Adventures in Digital Cultural Heritage

Stats and the Digital Humanities

Update 01/12/2011: do read the comments! lots of good stuff below this post.

So yesterday, I was having a relatively laid back day, rolling about the living room with the bairns, occasionally seeing what was happening on the twitters. A few people were retweeting How To Design Your Own Infographics and I thought “hey, I should make an infographic.” I concede that the world does not need any more infographics, but its just my line of work that it pays to play and tinker with these kind of things, before we start talking about them in class. What should I make an infographic about? I thought. Digital Humanities, of course!

But then you run into the problem… where are the stats about Digital Humanities that could be used for such a thing? There is nothing about it on the (problematic) wikipedia page, and facts and figures arent terribly close to hand. Now, I may never get round to making that infographic, but it would pay, I think, to start to gather up information about our discipline. Here is a list of some things I have come up with – or at least, could track down pretty quickly. I also asked the twitters, so have credited some people, below, who were quick to answer.

The growth in interest could be charted by the growth in subscriptions to the Humanist discussion list, 2002 onwards, which is available here, although Willard would have to be prodded for the more up to date figures, or they could be gleaned from the AHDO minutes from the past few years. (Willard has emailed me stats – current subscription is 1831 on the list!).

The number of submissions to the DH annual conference (formerly ALLC/ACH), compared with the acceptance rate, could be gathered, from the ADHO minutes. (I’m digging on this. Paul Spence has told me there are just under 400 submissions for dh2012).John Unsworth gave me the keys to the kingdom to generate the stats from conftool myself:

long papers

accepted

%accepted

DH2007

90

68

75.6

DH2008

156

95

60.9

DH2009

210

114

54.3

DH2010

231

86

37.2

DH2011

122

53

43.4

DH2011 was the first conference to have short paper formats in addition to the long papers: 57 were submitted. 21 of those were accepted, which was an acceptance rate of 36.8%. (Thanks, Matthew Jockers for the prod on that one).

The number of people on twitter identified as Digital Humanities scholars, in Dan Cohen’s comprehensive list. (It currently stands at 359 individual scholars doing Digital Humanities who are on twitter).

The number of people subscribing to Literary and Linguistic Computing, which means they are part of at least one membership association tied to the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organisations, and the individual numbers for ALLC, ACH, and Sedi/semi. Dave Beavan has responded: as 2 Nov 2011 @LLCjournal subscribers: ACH 89, ALLC 78, SDH-SEMI 36, joint 172. Total is 375! (will dig out historical figures to show the trajectory).

Update: here is a table showing the growth in membership of ADHO through subscription to LLC, culled from Dave and I’s membership reports:

type

Nov-07

Nov-08

Nov-09

Nov-10

Nov-11

ACH

73

57

87

76

89

ALLC

84

72

82

84

78

SDH/SEMI

n/a

13

17

39

36

Joint

67

92

121

115

172

Total

224

234

307

314

375

Update: Edward Vanhoutte tells me that as of December 6th, there are now 378 Subscribers to LLC. There are also 3,018 institutional subscriptions.

Edward has also provided some statistics regarding the home countries of authors who submit to the journal:

In 2011, the breakdown of the submitted papers per country shows that although most submissions come from Europe (81) and the US & Canada (27 & 14), Asia isfollowing with 22 submissions. There is potential growth in South America (3), theArab world (3), Africa (2) and Australia (1).

He also provided an overview of growth of total submissions to the journal:

2008 (65), 2009 (47), 2010 (41), 2011 (123).

The acceptance rate for papers submitted to LLC in 2010 was 54.84% coming down from 63.16% in 2009 and 71.70% in 2008. The acceptance rate for 2011 is 55.10%.

There is a list here of 330 projects funded by the AHRC between 1998 and 2004 that had some form of digital output. They dont include the funding amounts in the spreadsheet though (why? scared?) – I contacted them, and Ian Broadbridge, Portfolio Manager for the AHRC, provided me with this information

A list of AHRC-funded digital research resources is available on line at http://www.arts-humanities.net/ahrc. As you can see, it includes a wide range of browsing, sorting and filtering options, and connects to detailed information about each project, including content type and methods used. A report on this site gives a some brief statistical information about the costs of the projects involved. All these DRR projects also represent a significant investment of public money, to a total cost of approximately £121.5m across all the years and schemes covered. Taking, once again, Standard Research Grants for the years 2000-2008 as the more reliable basis for illustration, we can see that the average cost of DRR projects is significantly higher than that of all projects in this group taken together: £309,110 as against £232,948. The average costs increased substantially from 2006 because of the move to full-cost funding: in 2008 the respective figures for Standard Research Grants were £413,838 and £324,703: the cash difference remains in line with the overall figures, though the proportional difference is reduced as a result of a larger overhead element. The ICT Methods Network Award was £1,037,382 The Award amount for the ICT Strategy Projects is £979,364 The Award Amount for e-Science Workshops is £65,498 The Award amount for Research Grant (e-Science) is £2,014,626 The details of all of the individual value of the grants is obtainable from http://www.ahrc.ac.uk/FundedResearch/BrowseResearch.aspx

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation fund a large amount of projects in the Humanities which have a digital component. Their Scholarly Communication and Information Technology strand of funding paid $30,870,567 to projects in 2010 (gleaned from their grant report). I’m asking about previous years, as their reports work differently across other years.

Centernet – an international network of Digital Humanities centres – “has over 200 members from about 100 centers in 19 countries”. I cant see any easy way to get an exact figure from the listings. I emailed them – there are currently 167 digital humanities centres that are members of Centernet and “we get another couple every few weeks or so”. Neil Fraistat has added “Member centers come from 26 countries and currently 247 folks are on its listserv”.Karen Dalziel pointed me to the google map which plots all these centres. Should be relatively easy to export the KML file and datamine it to get the co-ordinates if you want to plot it in any other software.

James Cummings tells me there are 700 subscribers to the Digital Medievalist Discussion List. Further details: DM-L started in 2003. 15th Jan 2005 there were 306 members, 28th April 2010 537 members, 27th August 2011 672 members, 5th December 2011 700 members.There are also 584 followers of the twitter account.James also gave me access to the user statistics of the Digital Medievalist website:in 2011 there were 16,808Visits, from 12,763Unique Visitors, with 35,546Pageviews. 25% were returning visitors.

James also gave me access to the stats for the Text Encoding Initative‘s website:in 2011 there were 176,469Visits from 107,320Unique Visitors, with 537,750Pageviews. 40% were returning visitors.

last month the DHNow website had 14.5K visits from 5K unique visitors, and 48K page views.

@DHquarterly has 688 followers on twitter. A quick look at google analytics tells me that in the past 6 months (when google analytics was switched on in DHQ) there have been 23,636 visits from 15,547Unique Visitors who have looked at 52,370pages in total (average of 2 and bit pages per visit). There have been visits from 137 different countries.

Julianne Nyhan has provided me with stats about the Computers and the Humanities journal (commonly known as CHum) which ran from 1997 to 2004.There were 1244 papers published in total, from 811 single authors, and 433 joint authors.

What other facts and figures exist about DH? I’m looking for some other stats that “exist” – ie, dont tell me “count all the projects that say they are DH!” – erm, yeah. Tell me the count, and how you worked it out. Otherwise its a research project, rather than a “grab the existing stats” thing, which we should, as a community, be able to do, right? right?

I’ll ask the twitters, and DHanswers, but if you tweet me or message me or leave a comment here, I’ll update the list, above. Maybe someone will make that infographic…

Update: Desmond Schmidt did an analysis of the jobs posted to Humanist“There have been a lot of advertisements for jobs lately on Humanist.So I used the Humanist archive to do a survey of the last 10 years.I counted jobs that had both a digital and a humanities component, werefull time, lasted at least 12 months and were at PostDoc level or higher”.

One quick comment: One of the key DH funders is the Andrew Mellon Foundation. (They are US based but also fund international projects.) I don't think they have a list of their DH funded projects, per se. So teasing out that data will be more difficult. But if you feel like digging into it, they do list all their grants in their annual reports.

Hey, Melissa, I added some numbers to your posting on DH Answers. Some were meta: number of DH Answers users, unique visitors, countries of origin, posts… — and I also counted up 13 years' worth of MLA convention sessions on DH-related topics, as chronicled by the ACH.

If you consider THATCamp to be a digital humanities meeting (there are arguments for and against that), here are some THATCamp stats:

1 THATCamp in 20083 THATCamps in 200917 THATCamps in 201026 THATCamps in 201123 THATCamps (so far) planned for 201270 attendees on average per THATCamp1899 registered users on http://thatcamp.org57% of respondents “strongly agree” that THATCamp was useful for them37% of respondents “agree” that THATcamp was useful for them2% “neither agree nor disagree” that THATCamp was useful for them4% “disagree” that THATCamp was useful for them

There's a list of subject keywords associated with DH conference paper/poster/panel submissions which AFAIK has been in place and presumably added to over the years. It would be very interesting to track the distribution of submissions across these headings over the years.

Along these lines, it would also be very interesting to see what percentage of registered attendees at the DH conferences also attended the previous year's (or 3 or 4?) conference(s) and which subject keywords were associated with the attendees who were coming back year after year and who was not.

Similarly, the subject keywords associated with accepted papers and those of rejected papers.

The general idea is to try and use this as a way to track what kinds of disciplinary drifts have taken place in the DH world – so, for example, a slow and steady move away from the dominant position of English literature (or not) or a slow drift towards a greater inclusion of visual media.

Come to think of it, it may be a good idea to revisit the DH conference subjet list. There may be some value in replacing it instead with the list drawn up by http://www.arts-humanities.net/

OJS offers stats on Abstract, HTML and PDF views of an article. JDHCS doesn't (with one or two exceptions) publish articles in HTML format so the column “Total Galley Views” is in effect the same as PDF views (i.e. downloads).

Feel free to repost and re-use. The data is current as of Dec. 12th. 2011.

@Arno, really interesting stats. Most papers getting really good readership! Tell me, do you have an overall figure for the whole collection of papers, number of unique viewers to the site? I cant tell from the stats you give whether its the same readers reading a lot, or different ones, you see.

Yes, that would be good to know. Short answer, unfortunately, is that I don't have good numbers for either of your questions.

Longer version is that the OJS stats don't offer a vistor focused perspective (though no doubt it could be tickled out from the raw web logs). And as for total viewership.. JDHCS runs on letterpress.uchicago.edu (which also hosts another OJS journal) and was recently moved to a VM so the available stats are incomplete and somewhat inaccurate: http://bit.ly/tfYWkH Chicago has Google Analytics would be better for this and its running on the site as well but for whatever reason it's (I've been told) not capturing visitors properly.

These stats are basically UK-US based (and biased) and the result is a colonial-style infographics. They almost totally ignore the huge amount of DH work done in other countries (i.e. Italy, Spain, Portugal, France etc.). It would not be a bad idea if some of the ALLC / ADHO / TEI people would start reading (in) other languages. It is so sad to see how self-centered the anglo-american world of DH has become these days. Namasté.

@dominguero, thanks for your comments. Yes, the stats are mostly from UK and USA. These are the ones that I have been able to find. Tell me, instead of complaining, why dont you do something productive, and provide me with some stats that are from beyond the UK or USA? Why dont you do some legwork? I have made it clear that I am interested in ALL stats that I can get, and if I cant get stats from beyond the UK or US – is that my fault? its as much your fault as mine, please suggest something constructive rather than dismissing the whole activity. I would welcome constructive insight – I am not so taken by people who just complain and dont suggest a way forward.

and actually, @dominguero, thinking about your comment – in what way is twitter, or website stats just linked to the us/usa? When we say there are 167 countries featured, etc – in what way is that saying its just the us/usa? I wasnt aware that online activity was just the us/usa – so I think your comments are a little groundless. Thanks for stopping by, but do give me something to work with, rather than making snark.

Dear Melissa, I promise I will be “constructive” as soon as you will admit that you have misrepresented the international scenario of DH/HC. I think it is your problem to provide grounded info, not mine, as you presented your work as a “survey” of Digital Humanities. Actually, the info and data are out there: just search the Net with words like: Humanidades Digitales, Digitale Geisteswissenschaften, Informatica Umanistica, etc. Being a native English speaker can be a privilege, but it's not an excuse.If you look at the data for Internet access you'll discover that users in the western world (Europe and the U.S.) represent only the 35.7% of the totalFinally, before starting a survey, you need a methodology. It doesn't seem you have got one: what you have, instead, is a pile of data arranged nicely. Cheers